Martian anthropology strikes again.

[kiya]

So a fair number of people are discussing gendering at the moment. Most of these people aren't actually people whose journals I read regularly, but a couple of people whose journals I do read regularly have been commenting upon same with occasional links back.

I have a weird sort of interaction with matters of gender.

On ap, the standard of politeness is to use 'zie' or other gender-neutral pronouns for folks who one's not aware of preference for. When this gets used on me, it drives me completely insane. I consider GNP useful for people whose gender is unknown, unspecified, or other; my gender is none of these. Being identified as a 'he' is several (perhaps five or six) orders of magnitude more accurate than being referred to as a 'zie'. It actually has components of 'true' to it.

Most of the time I'm comfortable accepting 'female' as a word that describes me. I can't say I identify as female; it isn't a matter that has that much sfik-value for me. I've always had the basic attitude-feeling that if I do it, it has to be the sort of thing that women do, more or less.

Except.

Except.

When I'm spending time with women -- with Earth-woman-gendered-women -- I often wind up feeling like I'm doing the whole woman thing somehow wrong.

(This thought comes out in pretty simple trigonometry; for those people who run screaming from mathematics, I apologise; I can't do it any better.)

Unit circle centered on the origin; X-axis female-ness, Y-axis maleness. I'm not on either of the axes; I'm up about thirty degrees or so. I have a distinct, specified, very clear gender, located somewhere about half root-3 X + .5 Y, and when I'm near women who're near 1 on X, I'm clearly not fulfilling what womanness is by comparison, because I've got an angle there that I'm taking the cosine of to get there. Unit length falls short.

My gender is not unknown, unspecified, or other; it's just . . . a bit irrational.

"She" is close enough for everyday use. Call it about 86.6% accurate.

Comments

[larksdream]

When I'm spending time with women -- with Earth-woman-gendered-women -- I often wind up feeling like I'm doing the whole woman thing somehow wrong.

Mundane women, or the... er... "different" people like us? Or both?

I have to admit I don't really get along with most women who've been socialized to mainstream society. But under the right conditions, I can apparently pass as one convincingly enough to get offers from nice mundane boys who would run screaming for the hills if they actually knew me. *toothy smile*

[kiya]

People like us tend to be gendered in large part 'geek', regardless of their sex.

Ever noticed that?

The presentations, the attitudes, there's a particular normative force towards a particular axis: interest in technical minutiae and trivia, lack of overmuch concern about physical appearance, tendency to dissociate from other people with terms like 'mundane', obliviousness to a fair number of social norms especially including mating rituals.

Some days I consider myself gendered 'geek'. But then I don't wind up talking about baseball unless I'm doing stat-crunching, because Geeks Don't Do Sports. Or stuff like that.

[larksdream]

People like us tend to be gendered in large part 'geek', regardless of their sex.

*LOL* Right. This is true. (Which relates to a previous comment of yours, calling engineers an orientation.)

On the other hand, I'm only interested in the technical minutiae that interest ME, and thus find many geek conversations dreadfully dull. I care about my physical appearance, but I work towards MY appearance goals, which are a bit skew to those of mainstream society. I generally get really peeved when people use the term "mundane", as I think it sounds like they're trying to parley being rejected into being superior. And I'm decent with the social skills when I'm on an even emotional keel.

So where does that put me? On the fringe of the fringe? Some days I think I should go live in a cave with a volleyball for a friend. :P

[kiya]

I think that puts you in a similar box to mine, which is "Gender is complicated. I don't really think I get it."

I think you're closer to 'female' than I am, and I'm more 'geek' than you, if you want my opinion on targeting solutions. ;)

[larksdream]

Gender is complicated. I don't really think I get it.

Well, my take on it is more that gender is great, but it's not nearly as relevant to personality as many people seem to think it is. Certainly not when you start talking about individuals instead of population averages. I think I would actually make a better Traditional Male than I would a Traditional Female, but I certainly consider myself to be a perfectly good female as I am. (I guess this is my little fantasy world again, where the virtues of female-ness include strength and assertiveness.)

But that goes back to the fact I obliquely alluded to before, that my friends tend to be more towards the center of the traditional male / female continuum than Joe or Jane Average are. I just don't find the people who are exaggerated caricatures of either gender very appealing.

The things I find admirable in men I also find admirable in women, and vice versa. Not that there's no difference due to gender, but to me such differences are more like hearing the same piece interpreted by two different pianists, rather than completely different pieces of music. Or should be, anyway, in any reasonably evolved human being.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I agree with all of the above.

I have no further comment to make, principally because I'm too busy to think about it properly, and it's the sort of subject that requires several hours of thought rather than a few minutes of waffle :/

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Yah. I have been claiming "geek" as my gender for a couple of years now. Oddly, or perhaps not, since reaching that conclusion, I've had very liitle desire to read things about people exploring gender, which is something I found fascinating up til then. Unfortunately, I had things on that topic still en queue, and I don't know if or when I'll ever read them now.